Mankind's boat-shaped soul

MANY AUTHORS have tried to describe the intriguing bond between boats and mankind, but few have done it as well as John Steinbeck. When Steinbeck was still a comparatively young man he sailed with his great friend, Ed Ricketts, to Mexico to collect samples of marine invertebrates from the beaches of the Gulf of California. Ricketts was a biologist and had a laboratory in Monterey. When Steinbeck wrote his charming and well-known work, Cannery Row, Ricketts became the eccentric "Doc," so beloved of the Flophouse Boys and millions of devoted readers.

But there is another Steinbeck book which, although not as well-known as Cannery Row, probably reveals more about the author himself and, interestingly, about his love of boats. That book is The Log from The Sea of Cortez, the day-to-day story of the expedition. Simply put, it is a wonderful book for people who like to read beautiful English from the mind of a deep-thinking philosopher with a rare gift for explaining things simply and humorously.

Steinbeck died in 1968 at the age of 66 but his books are still in print and I doubt they will ever go out of print. Here is a small excerpt from The Log from the Sea of Cortez in which he illustrates the strange identification of Man (and Woman) with Boat:   

"A man builds the best of himself into a boat — builds many of the unconscious memories of his ancestors. Once, passing the boat department of Macy's in New York, where there are duck-boats and skiffs and little cruisers, one of the authors discovered that as he passed each hull he knocked on it sharply with his knuckles. He wondered why he did it, and as wondered, he heard a knocking behind him, and another man was rapping the hulls with his knuckles, the same tempo — three sharp knocks on each hull. During an hour's observation there, no man or boy, and few women, passed who did not do the same thing. Can this have been unconscious testing of the hulls? Many who passed could not have been in a boat, perhaps some of the little boys had never seen a boat, and yet everyone tested the hulls, knocked to see if they were sound, and did not even know he was doing it.

"How deep this thing must be . . . the boat designed through millenniums of trial and error by the human consciousness, the boat which has no counterpart in nature unless it be a dry leaf fallen by accident in a stream.  And Man receiving back from Boat a warping of his psyche so that the sight of a boat riding in the water clenches a fist of emotion in his chest. A horse, a beautiful dog, arouses sometimes a quick emotion, but of inanimate things only a boat can do it  . . . man, building this greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boat-shaped mind, and the boat, a man-shaped soul. His spirit and the tendrils of his feeling are so deep in a boat that the identification is complete. It is very easy to see why the Viking wished his body to sail away in an unmanned ship, for neither could exist without the other; or, failing that, how it was necessary that the things he loved most, his women and his ship, lie with him and thus keep closed the circle. In the great fire on the shore, all three started at least in the same direction, and in the gathered ashes who could say where man or woman stopped and ship began?"

Today's Thought

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley.

Tailpiece

"Hey, didn't I see you at the shrink's the other day?"
"Yeah, I'm having treatment for thinking I'm a racehorse."
"So what's the treatment?"
"Oh, he gave me a big bottle of medicine."
"How much do you take?"
"Depends whether I want to win or just run a place."

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)

Wet feet in the aft end

 THE COCKPIT of a sailboat is where most of the action takes place, but why is it called the cockpit? The dictionary tells us that a cockpit is a hole in the ground where cockfights take place, but I have noticed that cockfighting does not take place much on sailboats any more. So the question remains.

During the times I have spent in nautical cockpits my mind has been most concerned with what would happen if a big wave came flooding over the stern and filled the cockpit. At times like this, in the middle of a dark night, I try to calculate mentally how quickly the water would drain away through the patently inadequate drains provided by most boat builders. I never succeed in this calculation. Even if I remember that pi are squared and pressure is equal to something to do with height, minus friction in the drain pipes, I can never come up with a figure that is reassuring. It always takes too long for the cockpit to empty itself.

With a cockpit full of water, the boat will be trimmed way down by the stern, and succeeding waves will find it easier to roll on board and find their way down below, even if you have a nice strong bridge deck and sturdy companionway washboards.

I find myself wondering if the bilge pumps can cope with this sudden rush of water into the bilges, and trying to remember when last I cleaned the strainers. And so the watch passes in nervous contemplation until, at last, I am free to hand over the helm, take a large suck at the rum bottle and throw myself upon a warm bunk.

You might well ask why the cockpit is situated so far aft, in the position most vulnerable to large following swells. Well, it’s because that’s the place from which the person at the helm can get the best view of the sails. This is especially true for small boats, although some bigger boats can accommodate center cockpits that are less likely to be flooded.

One of the great authorities on ocean cruising, Eric Hiscock, said it was debatable whether the cockpit should be made self-draining. I would have thought this a no-brainer, but I have learned to be cautious about gainsaying the old-timers, and I’ve noticed that several well-known designs, such as the Nordic Folkboat, have cockpits that drain directly into the bilges. Their later fiberglass version, the International Folkboat, does have a self-draining cockpit, however.

Hiscock’s observation was that a self-draining cockpit in a small yacht would have to be so shallow, to keep it above normal water level, that the crew might washed out by a boarding wave.  Obviously, the more freeboard your boat has, the deeper a self-draining cockpit can be, and the better the protection for the crew.

My own observation is that the cockpit drains are never big enough, and the seat-locker lids are never waterproof enough. Furthermore, luckily, the instances of sailboats being pooped are reassuringly rare.

Some people say that most of the water in a flooded cockpit would be flung out quickly by the violent motion of the boat. Hiscock was one of them. But I have my doubts. In any case, I don’t want to try it. I might get flung out with the bathwater.

Finally, I’d like to share something it took me many years to figure out, and that’s why the drains in most cockpits are situated at the forward end of the cockpit sole, not aft where it would seem to make more sense.  It’s because when a boat sails at speed she raises a quarter-wave that rises aft, sometimes almost up to deck level.  With the water level outside so high, the normal gravity drains would never work; in fact they might back-flood water into the cockpit. So yacht designers place the drains close to the forward edge of the cockpit where the water level outside is lower.

For various reasons, some boats never manage to empty the cockpit completely when they’re under way and heeled. Often, you’ll find them equipped with teak gratings to keep their owners’ tootsies dry, but if your boat doesn’t boast this deluxe feature I’d recommend a pair of rubber boots. As nautical couture goes, it’s not very haute, but it’s a lot cheaper than a teak grating.

Today’s Thought

In smooth water God help me; in rough water I will help myself.

— George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum

Tailpiece

“This here plant belongs to the fuchsia family.”

“Uh-huh. You just looking after it while they’re away?”

(Drop by every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, for a new Mainly about Boats column.) 

One of the five best

A MESSAGE from Ivor Tungin-Cheaque, Chairman of Vigor’s Silent Fan Club, says:

O Wise and Wonderful One:

Once again, a dilemma of considerable proportions has raised itself in regard to membership of your Silent Fan Club. As you well know, members are forbidden to contact you, or praise in any way your unmatched wisdom and unrivalled literary skills. Because membership is automatic from birth, you have the biggest fan club the world has ever known.

But a British commercial website has just rated your column one of the five best sailing blogs in the world.*

This is nonsense in one respect, of course, as everyone knows your blog is the best, not just one of the five best. Yet, considering the thousands of sailing blogs cluttering the world-wide web, being one of the best five is enough to cause a great deal of worry to those of us whose job it is to keep your club members silent, lest they should have to be expelled for contacting you and smothering you with unwanted praise.

In my own defense I have to say I have done a more-than-respectable job in this regard so far this year. President Putin has not contacted you. Prince Philip has managed to withhold his great admiration. Donald Trump never once mentioned you in Cleveland. And so on. I believe most of the credit for this remarkable success devolves upon me as I quietly slave away on your behalf — but I digress . . .

The publicity generated by your being publicly recognized as one of the best writers in the world puts the Silent Fan Club in a perilous position. It is obvious that if more people are exposed to your glorious prose, the greater the temptation will be to accord you generous praise. And, as you know, anyone who does that is automatically expelled from the club.

To avoid this highly undesirable circumstance, I must beg you once again to write dumber. That is, more dumbly.  Please start toning down the cleverness of your columns and the skill with which you wield the editorial pen. If your fans find less to admire in your writing, the less likely they will be to give in to their instinct to burst into ill-considered praise. I realize that this will not come easily to a man of your exceptional talent but I believe it can be done with a large dose of steady application.

I close with admiration for your sage-like utterances, your ready wit and charm, the subtle thrust and parry of your sparkling repartee, and the wisdom, Solomon-like, that graces your princely brow.

Yours Humbly and Obediently,

IVOR TUNGIN-CHEAQUE (Chairman, Vigor’s Silent Fan Club)

PS: Sorry about the writing. My new strait-jacket is very stiff.

* http://www.seachest.co.uk/blog/2016/01/21/5-of-the-best-sailing-blogs/

Today’s Thought

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Thomas A, Edison, (Quoted in Golden Book, April, 1931)

Tailpiece

Two blondes walked into a building and . . .

(Hell, you’d think at least one of them would have noticed it.)

Time to watch the weather

IT’S TIME for East Coast boaters to start worrying about hurricanes. One owner of a 35-foot sailboat who often crosses over to the Bahamas has already started worrying. He wants to know if sailboats can survive hurricanes. “How high do the waves get, and how do yachts handle them?” he asks.

Well, certainly, many sailboats have survived hurricanes. For example, Atom, a 30-foot Tahiti ketch sailed around the world by Jean Gau, a New York chef, survived a hurricane that sank the Pamir, a four-masted barque, not far away from him.

But it’s misleading to say if one small boat survived a hurricane then others can survive also. There are boats and there are hurricanes, and no two are the same. To a great extent, it depends on how far the boat is from the center of the hurricane, and whether she is in the safe quadrant or the dangerous quadrant.

As for the height of waves, here’s what Captain Edwin Harding, author of Heavy Weather Guide, has to say about it: Waves of 35 to 40 feet are not uncommon in an average hurricane. In giant storms they can reach to 50 feet or higher.

How do you deal with waves that high? It depends on the size of the breaking crests, the characteristics of your boat, and where the nearest land lies, whether you heave to, lie ahull, or run off. In extremis, there doesn’t seem much you can do other than take down all sail, slide the companionway tightly shut, and climb into a bunk with a lee cloth to prevent your being flung out. Any jetting crest that is taller than 55 percent of the overall length of your boat will capsize you if it hits you broadside on — a 19-foot crest if you’re aboard a 35-footer. That’s a huge plunging breaker, admittedly, but they do happen and if the wind is blowing against the Gulf Stream, things can get even worse, and very quickly.

So if I were crossing to the Bahamas and back I’d keep a good eye on the weather forecasts. I never want to be at sea in the teeth of a hurricane, even if I think I can survive because Atom survived.

Today’s Thought

Let him who knows not how to pray go to sea.

John Ray, English Proverbs

Tailpiece

Mary had a little watch,

She swallowed it one day,

So now she’s taking laxatives

To pass the time away.

The boats that chuckle

A MESSAGE from Frank, in Columbus, Ohio, says:

“Dear John: You once wrote a column about lapstrake planking. I was recently visiting in New England and saw lots of lapstrake wooden boats. What’s the advantage?”

Well Frank, the first thing is that it’s beautiful. If you like looking at pretty girls, you’ll like looking at lapstrake. It emphasizes all the curves. That’s not actually why boats were built with overlapping planks, or strakes, in the first place, though.

Because each plank overlaps the one below it, the thickness is almost doubled along each edge. That makes it very stiff and strong — suitable for one-design racing dinghies, smallish fishing boats landing on beaches, or ship’s launches that take a good pounding. And because it’s so strong, a lapstrake (or clinker-built) hull is normally much lighter than its carvel-planked cousin.

But building in lapstrake is a fine art, and mostly a lost one these days except in a few wooden-boat centers scattered around the country. In the old days the planks had to be finished so finely that they would not leak even in the absence of caulking. These days, a fine bead of polyurethane or polysulphide makes it easier to form a watertight seal along the plank edges but formerly it was the skill of the boatwright alone that kept the water out.

The planking always starts at the keel and works its way upwards. Copper nails with rooves fasten the planks together with a minimum overlap of about 5/8 inch with 1/4-inch planks — and more on bigger boats, of course. At the stem and transom, where the planks come together, the strakes need expert treatment and call for fine woodworking skills.

Older wooden boats without caulking would open cracks along the seams if they dried out for too long, but if they were allowed to soak in water again for a couple of days, the wood would swell and cure that problem.

There isn’t much lapstrake construction around these days, of course, at least not in commercial production, but when fiberglass took over from wood some 60 years or more ago some boatbuilders thought it might be a good idea to produce lapstrake GRP boats.

The problem is that fiberglass doesn’t like to make sudden sharp bends, and lapstrake is ALL sharp bends between one plank and the next if you run your hand down the side of the hull from top to bottom. So they had to fillet the joints between planks into nice gentle curves, which took more material and added weight — and that, in turn, negated the light-weight advantage of lapstrake hulls. I expect the construction of a lapstrake mould was also much more difficult and expensive than a plain carvel one. The net result was that a fiberglass lapstrake hull was strong and pretty and more maintenance-free, but often impractical from the point of view of construction and cost.

One-off wooden racing boats are rarely built in lapstrake, despite the weight advantage, because of the added resistance of each lap at slow speeds and because the greater surface area of the hull results in more drag.

One thing that surprises people who have never owned a lapstrake boat is how much noise they make at anchor. Each little passing wavelet smacks into the underside of the laps with great zest, resulting in an unexpectedly loud chorus of noise that owners of lapstrake boats are wont to dismiss as cheerful “chuckles.” But let me tell you, Frank, that if you’re anchored nearby, in the middle of an otherwise quiet night, you might not be chuckling so much.  

Today’s Thought

This sort of thing takes a deal of training.

— W. S. Gilbert, Ruddigore

Tailpiece

A newly released government report reveals why universities are often referred to as “storehouses of knowledge.”

“It is simply that undergraduates bring so much knowledge in,” says the report, “and graduates take so little out.”

Current and speed over ground

HOW OFTEN have you heard a boat owner say: "I need more power to fight the current.  I need a bigger engine."

Whenever I hear that, I know this is not a true sailor talking. This is a land person, not a water person.

Land persons know about power in cars. More power enables a car to go uphill faster. With enough power and low-down torque, you don't even need to change gears.

Land persons appear to equate a boat struggling against a current with a car going up a hill, which is something a natural-born water person never does.

Water persons are blessed with a natural affinity for sensing the speed and direction of their craft. They can "feel" movement that they can't see. Something deep down inside tells them they're also going sideways or even backwards when it looks as if they're going straight ahead.  They know without ever having to think about it that the thin sheet of water they're sailing in is often moving with respect to the ground beneath it because of a tidal stream or an ocean current.

They know when they are steaming upstream against an ebbing river that the current they're fighting is not the same as a hill on a highway. Their speed through the water does not decline, as an underpowered car's does with respect to the road. It's the current that robs them of speed over the ground, not the lack of engine power. Always presuming, of course, that the engine is capable of pushing the boat at hull speed.

A bigger engine is not going to help, unless it's a whole lot bigger, because it takes an enormous amount of extra power to make a displacement hull exceed its hull speed by even a small amount.

This whole business seems to be quite difficult for land persons to comprehend, but I expect the manufacturers of new, more powerful engines are quite happy to let them remain ignorant.  And the water persons are quite happy, too, knowing that the land persons will always be the lubbers they suspected them to be.

Today's Thought

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

— Isaac Bashevis Singer, NYT 3 Dec 78

Tailpiece

 "Hey buddy, I thought you had a date with that blonde tonight."

"Yeah, I did."

"What happened?"

"Well, we went to her place and sat around and chatted and then she put on some quiet music and changed into her lingerie and lay down on the sofa. I guess she was ready to go to sleep. Then she turned out the lights — so I came home. I can take a hint."

Beware deck-stepped masts

IT PAYS SAILBOAT BUYERS to be suspicious about deck-stepped masts. It pays to check if the deck directly beneath the mast has sagged. And the way the canny buyer does this is by feeling the tension in the mast shrouds. A soft deck simply won’t support much tension. It will just sag further.

You can just about play a tune on a properly tensioned shroud. In fact, I’m always amazed at how much tension the experts advise you to wind in via the turnbuckles.

I have in front of me the carefully preserved pamphlet that came with a pair of Loos tension gauges I bought many years ago, and it says:

“Contrary to popular thought, a slack rig is more punishing on a hull than a properly adjusted tight rig. Insufficient tension will not reduce the loads transmitted to the hull. Slack rigging will punish the spar and rigging needlessly by allowing excessive movement, chafe, and shock loading.”

Now for a boat with 7/32-inch 1 x 19 stainless-steel shrouds, such as a 27-foot Cape Dory I once owned, the Loos people advise you to pre-load the tension to 700 pounds. The forestay should be tightened to 1,000 pounds.

I was always scared to do this. The numbers sounded too big. When I first bought my gauges I screwed up my nerve and set the shrouds at 450 pounds apiece. Years later, encouraged by the fact that the sides of the boat had not yet risen to meet each other, and the mast had not yet been driven through the deck, I raised the tension to 600 pounds. But I never got as far as 700 pounds.

The Loos pamphlet goes on to warn that “the lateral stiffness of the mast and the fore-and-aft stiffness of the spreaders is reduced by a factor of 2 when the leeward shrouds go slack. This important structural characteristic is not generally recognized.”

I presume that when they say “reduced by a factor of 2” they mean the mast stiffness is halved. That sounds quite serious. But then, one must also recognize that they are in the business of selling tension gauges. Not that I would suspect them for one moment of deliberately scaring people into buying their gauges. It’s just that I’m a born skeptic. And 600 pounds was just fine for me, thanks.

Today’s Thought

We're probably the opposite of the Osbournes. We run a very tight ship.

Hulk HoganH — Hulk Hogan

Tailpiece

Last month a local Small Claims Court judge told a nervous woman witness to make herself at ease, and talk to him as if she were talking to her husband or friends at home.

The case is still proceeding.